TRAITORS IN THE WHITE HOUSE?

If Dubya thinks the Dems are hot about outing spies, he should
check with his own dad

By William Rivers Pitt

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I
have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by
exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most
insidious of traitors." -- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999

Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very
powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove
was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert
Mosbacher Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an
avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by
planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign
figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his
walking papers.

Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003
edition of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind which
quoted comments from John DiIulio, a domestic policy advisor to the
White House who had just retired from his post. On October 24, 2002,
DiIulio had sent a letter to Suskind describing what he had seen
while working for the Bush administration. The meat of the letter
described an administration far, far more interested in raw political
triangulation and ruthless spin than in actual policy and government
functionality. Some excerpts from DiIulio's letter:

"Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios
of this administration on Karl Rove ... some staff members, senior
and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers.
They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of
the president's top people routinely tell the president what they
really think if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the
bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful
person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political
advisor post near the Oval Office."

Even a casual political observer would have trouble missing the
fact that this is one of the sharpest political outfits ever to
reside in the Oval Office. Bush's team is a unified wall, cemented to
their message-of-the-day, and they have done very well for themselves
because of this. All of this can be laid at the feet of Karl Rove,
the senior political advisor to George W. Bush. According to DiIulio,
the preeminence of political considerations within this
administration is so complete that any and all policy considerations
or contemplation of actual issues are not so much in the back seat as
they are in the trunk below the spare tire and the jack. This, again,
can be laid at the feet of Mr. Rove.

All of Washington and the country has been buzzing for the last
few days over a report that the CIA has asked the Justice Department
to investigate the White House regarding a matter of important
national security. The wife of a former ambassador named Joseph
Wilson, it has been alleged, was "outed" as an active CIA agent to
columnist Robert Novak by this White House in an act of political
revenge.

Joseph Wilson was the man dispatched to Niger in February of 2002
by the CIA, after Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA to figure
out whether there was any substance to the charge that Iraq was
attempting to procure uranium "yellow cake" from that nation for the
purpose of starting a nuclear weapons program. Ambassador Wilson
went, investigated and returned eight days later to state flatly that
the evidence was garbage. He has claimed since that his analysis was
one of three intelligence reports debunking the Niger story.
Ambassador Wilson told this to Cheney's office, the CIA, the State
Department and the National Security Council. Despite the fact that
Wilson made it clear that these allegations were untrue -- it was
revealed that the "evidence" to support the Niger uranium charge was
a pile of crudely forged documents -- George W. Bush used the Niger
uranium evidence dramatically in his 2003 State of the Union address.

In July, Ambassador Wilson went very public, criticizing the
White House for using evidence to support war that they knew was
patently false. One week later, Robert Novak reported that Wilson's
wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. As it turns out, two senior
White House officials cold-called six different journalists and
informed them of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent, according to
an anonymous administration official quoted by the Washington Post.
None of the journalists ran the story. That same administration
official was quoted about these revelations as saying, "Clearly, it
was meant purely and simply for revenge." Joseph Wilson likewise
charges that this act was done as an act of revenge for his vocal
criticism of George W. Bush and the administration's actions leading
up to the Iraq war. Specifically, he views Karl Rove as being
possibly involved in, or at least condoning, the cutting down of his
wife.

The facts of this story are singularly grotesque. Taken at the
top layer, you have a White House that appears perfectly willing to
go after the family members of its critics. Valerie Plame's career is
destroyed, period. The act itself displays a level of viciousness
that is dangerous to the functioning of this, or any, democracy.

Peel the second layer and you discover the rank illegality of it
all. Section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of
1982 reads as follows:

"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified
information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses
any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not
authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the
information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the
United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert
agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be
fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or
both."

The third layer is where the darkness truly lurks, and where the
deadly importance of this situation lies. Valerie Plame was not
simply an analyst or a data cruncher. She was an operative running a
network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to
give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. That sentence
deserves to be written twice. She was an operative running a network
dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give
weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

The Bush administration pushed very hard the idea that America is
in danger from WMDs being placed into the hands of terrorists. This
was one of the central arguments behind the war in Iraq. Yet in order
to protect Bush's political standing, a couple of "administration
officials" blew Valerie Plame, and by proxy her network, completely
out of the water in an attempt to shut her husband up. In short, in
order to protect Bush from the ramifications of using fake evidence
to support his war, this White House destroyed an intelligence
network that was protecting us from the threat posed by chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons.

We are less safe now that Valerie Plame is no longer performing
this vital task, and the members of her network are in mortal danger
of being revealed and destroyed. Beyond that, we are facing a level
of hypocrisy that shatters any and all previously known boundaries.
This administration ginned up a war in Iraq based upon manufactured
evidence and wildly overstated threats, all of which was painted over
with rhetoric about defending the country from terrorists and weapons
of mass destruction. The fate of Valerie Plame, and her network,
shows without doubt that the moral standing of this administration is
as empty as Saddam Hussein's WMD cache.

In Ambassador Wilson's words, "Naming her this way would have
compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with
which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff
of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."

The current spin from administration defenders within and without
the mainstream media is that Valerie Plame was only an analyst, and
not an operative. This, somehow, is supposed to lessen the blow of an
administration willing to attack the families of its critics. Yet the
characterization of Plame as an analyst is factually incorrect. For
one, Robert Novak himself indicated that she was an operative in the
original report that birthed this scandal. "Wilson never worked for
the CIA," wrote Novak, "but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency
operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Ray McGovern, who was for 27 years a senior analyst for the CIA,
further confirms the status of Plame within the CIA. "I know Joseph
Wilson well enough to know," said McGovern in a telephone
conversation we had today, "that his wife was in fact a deep cover
operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this
administration's first-priority issue: Weapons of mass destruction."

McGovern further elaborated on the damage done when such an agent
has their cover blown. "This causes a great deal of damage," said
McGovern. "These kinds of networks take ten years to develop. The
reason why they operate under deep cover is that the only people who
have access to the kind of data we need cannot be associated in any
way with the American intelligence community. Our operatives live a
lie to maintain these networks, and do so out of patriotism. When
they get blown, the operatives themselves are in physical danger. The
people they recruit are also in physical danger, because foreign
intelligence services can make the connections and find them.
Operatives like Valerie Plame are real patriots."

Mr. Rove has done this kind of thing before, specifically using
Robert Novak in that one notable attempt to cut down Mosbacher. Rove
is a disciple of the undisputed heavyweight champion of political
assassins, Lee Atwater, and has often reached into a deep bag of
dirty tricks to accomplish his political ends. He knows no ideology
beyond power, and has no bones about using it to wreak havoc on
anyone who gets in his crosshairs. The Esquire article about DiIulio
finds him recounting a singular Rove moment, as he overheard a
conversation happening in another room: "Inside, Rove was talking to
an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone
awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no
mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But
after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars.
'We will f**k him. Do you hear me? We will f**k him. We will ruin
him. Like no one has ever f**ked him!'"

Guess who was doing the cursing and threatening.

One last bit of inside baseball. When the Niger scandal erupted,
the Bush administration went out of its way to blame the CIA for the
mess, despite the fact that the CIA, along with the entire
intelligence community, had been cut out of the loop by Don
Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans. The OSP, and its pet Iraqi Ahmad
Chalabi, became the source for all of the information regarding
Iraq's weapons capabilities, and a number of intelligence insiders
have publicly blamed that group for the preponderance of highly
erroneous data about Iraq. For the Bush administration to completely
usurp the CIA by depending solely on data manufactured by the Office
of Special Plans, and then to turn around and blame CIA when the
OSP's data did not turn out to be true, is as insane as it is
laughable. Yet this is what they have done. The CIA's calling for
this investigation is nothing more or less than the Agency defending
itself, proving out the oft-repeated warning that one scapegoats the
CIA at their mortal peril.

Also, the fact that this data came to the Washington Post from a
White House official means that another Deep Throat may have just
been born.

The White House has denied the allegation, and promises a full
investigation. A great many people find it laughable to believe this
White House is capable of investigating itself, and are demanding an
independent investigation. A quick look at the White House telephone
logs will reveal who called whom, and when. It may well be the case
that Rove was not involved; there are several administration
officials -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Card --
along with a constellation of administration associates and media
mouthpieces, who had a vested interest in shutting Ambassador
Wilson's mouth. The White House phone logs will be revelatory. If
this administration fails to hand those logs over, they will stand in
taint of high treason.

J'accuse.

William Rivers Pitt is managing editor of truthout.org, where
this originally appeared. He is author of three books: War On Iraq,
Context Books; The Greatest Sedition is Silence, Pluto Press; and Our
Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism, available in August from
Context Books.